I think I slept the first night, but I can’t be sure since there’s no way to tell the time without exposure to light. At first it seemed scary to lose track of time, but now it’s actually bliss. Uninterrupted, guilt-free rest feels like warm honey seeping into my sore, burnt-out parts. So I roll over and sleep some more. If you open your eyes, just close them again. Then you won’t be afraid of the dark.
When you finally get up, create a routine. Change into pants, do push-ups, and make your bed all by feeling. Learning how to navigate a room comes down to touching things in a certain order. You can access the bathroom from the doorway at the corner of the bed. The doorway, the sink wall, makes me stand on the final approach to the toilet. I remember lowering my seat in a “sit, sit, stand” fashion.
breakfast. I groped for a cushion on the floor next to a low wooden bench. Above it is a box built into the wall that connects the room with the outer vestibule. Doors on both sides allow two-way access without letting in any light. For now, this box is my only connection to the outside world. You can quit at any time, but promise yourself you won’t.
I open the box and rummage through the metal containers containing soup, salad, PB&J, carrots, hummus, olives, and more. Eating is everything you do, so go slowly. I play with the boiled egg, sliding it around the container like a slippery weeble. It’s fun while it lasts. After 15 minutes, there’s nothing more to do.
I was worried that I would be bored for more than three days, but surprisingly, it wasn’t that much of a problem. To me, boredom is when there are so many things to do, but none of them seem fun. Here, you can’t even stare at a wall, so “boredom” becomes a longing for sunlight, mountain air, and companionship, and longing becomes dreaming. Here it’s easy.
Plus, I’m really not alone. The day before dark I met Scott Berman. He launched Sky Cave in 2020 with his wife Jill. He said he would come every night to refill the food box and chat with me for a few minutes to check in. His main tip was to allow yourself to be “nobody” and “soften” to his experience. When I asked for details, he said more bluntly: “It’s like preparing for your deathbed.” In other words, it’s better to surrender and accept than to resist and suffer.
Berman, 40, has a lean, muscular physique and a large, bushy beard. He says people who use spiritual tools such as chanting and meditation to fight the darkness often experience difficulties. Eventually, they are exhausted and it is still dark, so they have no choice but to sit for hours and days. “Darkness is almost countercultural,” he says. “I can’t keep my heart there.”
Berman discovered this a while ago. He grew up happily as the son of supportive parents in New Jersey, but a breakup in college turned him into an obsessive search for spiritual fulfillment. He read Ram Dass and lived at a Vipassana meditation center in Canada. He stayed alone in a cabin in Alaska and a canyon in Baja. He ran naked around Joshua Trees at nightfall, and at music festivals he sang and banged the drums. “I had no filter at all,” he says. Once, he stood barefoot and shirtless outside New York’s Grand Central Station singing into the sun until a police officer offered him mental health support.
“Or you can just wear a shirt and stop being weird,” Berman replied.
“Yes,” the officer said. “Let’s do so.”
In 2006, Berman met Jill at a bluegrass festival, and two years later they were inseparable. He was singing and playing the drums while she was dancing in her daze. Around 2012, he began returning to mainstream society, working on a cannabis farm in southern Oregon. For the first time in years, Berman has money and wants more material things, he says. [energy] crystal. ” Around that time, I heard about a man in Portland who was doing a dark retreat, and I was intrigued by the idea. Instead of visiting his home, they blocked the windows of a rental home near Ashland and made a home of their own. They remained indoors for five days. It wasn’t very good.
“When you do it in your own home with people you know, it’s a lot more intimate,” Berman says. So a few months later he tried it again. This time he only had 10 days in Baja. He was “completely devastated” by how difficult it was to be alone in the dark with no distractions. “I’m very happy when I’m alone in the forest, but I didn’t have that experience here,” he says. “Still, I was blown away by how sensitive and aware I became.”
The initial discomfort and surrender gradually revealed the core of his true self, which he had been busy burying beneath a pile of New Age “spirituality.” The nothingness of it all took away the construct. “All you have to do is Get used to it “Into the universe,” he says, which means going deeper and becoming more conscious. “I wanted to go outside and create a hideout in the dark.”
Three years after he opened Sky Cave, I’m here on the floor digging through memories. I’m 5 years old and I ride a Colvair with my mom. Yesterday I was sitting on the bank of a stream. I’m lying in bed, shirtless, feeling my wife’s breath draw warm circles on my back. This feels like hours. Slowly, long pauses of no thought, no thought, no concentration slip between my thoughts. That’s when the hallucinations begin.
